The Pain Nurse (8 page)
Gravity was his enemy. Anything dropped to the floor was lost. A pen, a book, a pill. A towel, a water cup, a dollar bill. He couldn’t pick it up because he couldn’t stand, much less bend down. His only recourse was to ask a nurse to retrieve it, or ask Cindy. But she wouldn’t be coming back. He had lost her just as surely as if she had fallen out of his hands to earth, his useless legs unable to let him follow her. The morning had been slow and difficult, as he had pulled on his T-shirt and sweatpants, then, in greater agony, socks and shoes. Cindy had bought him workout shoes with Velcro snaps, to avoid the near impossibility of holding his legs in place long enough to tie shoes. Then he had angled the wheelchair close to the bed and locked each wheel in place, while he carefully pushed himself into a sitting position and maneuvered to the edge of the mattress.
Like so much, getting up had gone from an unthinking move of a normal human being to an act of significant physical effort. Using one hand to grip the bed railing, he would roll to his side. Then he could rise to his elbow and, again grabbing the bed, swing his body into a sitting position. He used his strong right leg, hooking his right foot into his left ankle to pull the weak leg along. It all took planning and care. He couldn’t feel his bottom, so he had to be sure that he was actually sitting on the bed and not sliding to the floor. Then, relying on upper-body strength, he would lift himself across to the chair. It wasn’t exactly kosher: he was supposed to wait for a nurse, but they were always busy. And no one seemed to notice or care when he just wheeled himself out of the room and down to the nurses’ station.
There he would be given a multivitamin, stool softener, Vicodin for pain control. He was profoundly aware of the med times. He didn’t need a watch. His body had betrayed him with the tumor, but its clockworks for pain were precise and as unforgiving as the enemy gravity. If he missed the pills by even a few minutes, the pain would break through again. It was a creature living inside him, pinned up in the fragile pharmaceutical cage. The pain frightened him.
After the morning physical therapy and lunch, he was on his own. No one told him how long he might be in the rehab unit. It was the way he imagined jail time. If he hadn’t been free to roam the hospital he was sure he would go mad. But he could come and go as he pleased from the neuro-rehab ward and now, after so many days, had just become part of the landscape. Some people said hello. Most ignored him. So he wheeled himself through the halls, watching people, trying to keep dark thoughts outside. He ended up in the corridor leading to the old entrance to the hospital. It was a quiet place because the outside doors were sealed now, the main entrance moved. But the grand arched ceiling remained, along with a display of historic photographs from the hospital’s history. The entrance to the hospital chapel was nearby, the chapel itself empty. Outside, the light was somber and wintry. A woman walked by, her hair bouncing on her shoulders at every step, reminding him of Cindy when he had first met her. He put the thought in a box, put the box on an imaginary shelf holding thoughts about his wife. He wouldn’t be the first cop with a busted marriage.
He played a game of thinking about all the women he had crushes on or had lusted after while he had been married. One was a pretty young yellow-haired cadet with flawless fair skin. She had followed him around with a doe-eyed interest that was both innocent and knowing, and once, when he had seen her in a skirt, he had realized how attracted he was to her. Karen was his partner before Dodds, a woman going through a divorce, who said Will was her best friend. One night in the car they had started kissing, until he had stopped it. There was the assistant DA with the violet eyes, the writer who was working on a profile of the homicide detectives—in all those cases, he had felt the attraction, known it was mutual, and each time he had pushed it away. Only once did he slip, nothing compared with Cindy’s serial infidelities. He pushed that thought away. He thought of the others.
Maybe now he would look up one of those women.
And do what? He hadn’t had an erection since the surgery.
He had always known Cindy would leave him for good. He was such a fool. Last night he had cried for her, for what they briefly had, for what he briefly hoped they might have again, when she had flown to his side after the tumor had been diagnosed. One last time he had melted into his ideal of Cindy, rather than the frozen reality. When they had first met, she was a vulnerable young woman who had been left adrift by the father of her child, and Will had vowed that he would never abandon her. That vow, and the time when they had seemed to glow together, those fleeting, joyful moments early on, had kept him going so long. It was like an addiction.
But after the cry, he had returned to the odd mental box he had been in since surgery. One side of the box was his gratitude at being alive. Things had looked so grim when the tumor had first been diagnosed: it might be malignant; there might be more; he might never walk again. Another side was oddly calm, where he was a good, self-sufficient patient, working hard in rehab, foiling the dark expectations of Lauren the shrink. The third side was his periodic bouts of claustrophobia—he had to get out of this hospital, just to sleep for one night—this one he concealed, and then it receded. And the fourth was the doctor’s murder, which brought it all back. That side was unfinished business, and, sure, he was also probably using it to distract himself from his life ahead: disabled, handicapped, crippled, dreading every new pain or change of feeling. Did the box hold anything?
“Pig.”
The voice behind him made him start, but his adrenaline, didn’t go down once the surprise was gone. He wheeled around, forcing himself to be calm. The man who stood before him was taller than Will; in fact, he knew that the man was exactly six feet five and, at one time, had weighed 250 pounds. Now he looked heavier, with a pronounced gut straining at his leather jacket. His face had always seemed ordinary except for the dramatic thick brown eyebrows that nearly met and the slight dimple in his chin that broke the monotony. Now, it looked puffy and his features seemed too small for that face. He had taken to shaving his head, which had long made Will imagine a malevolent Pillsbury doughboy.
“You’re the only police officer I’d call pig,” Bud Chambers said. “Or should I just say rat?”
Will said nothing. He had never felt more vulnerable. He vainly glanced at his lap for any weapon, seeing only the small fanny pack that held a few dollars, Kleenex, and his wallet.
“I’ve seen you look better, Borders,” the man continued, pacing around him in a small arc. “Like when you got my badge.”
“You did that to yourself,” Will said. “You lied on your logs.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Right.” He folded his arms and looked down at Will. “So I hear you’ve been looking for me, so I thought I’d come looking for you.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Will controlled his voice, used his calm peace officer voice.
“Oh, you know, the old cop grapevine. You know how that goes.”
“Sure.”
“Like I know your wife left you. Who couldn’t a seen that coming from ten miles away? You know, I fucked her once…”
The atrium and two converging hallways were utterly empty save for the two men and the display boards with their historic photographs and newspaper clippings. Even the normal noise of the hospital didn’t make it this far away. Will studied Chambers’ hands, thick and pale, balled into heavy fists.
“Well,” Will said, “at least you didn’t murder her.”
Chambers smirked with his thin, small mouth.
“Where were you on the night of December 6th?”
“What, aren’t you going to Mirandize me? Oh, I forgot, you’re not a cop anymore. You’re just another jerkoff in the hospital.” Chambers started to walk away but suddenly turned and came toward Will, moving his heavy body with quick strides. He grabbed the sides of the wheelchair and bent forward. His breath was foul.
“I didn’t kill her! Got that? I didn’t kill her or any of those girls. Craig Factor was convicted! The DNA was his!”
Will met the furious gaze, pushed all his fear down into his useless legs. At least they could be good for something. He said calmly, “DNA evidence can be tampered with.”
Chambers pushed off the chair and stamped back. Will used his hands to brake the wheels, stopping himself from rolling backward.
“You couldn’t prove a thing,” Chambers said. “You wrecked your own career, trying to frame me. You left homicide to go to the rat squad.”
“I want bad cops off the street.”
“Fuck you. You know what that makes you in the eyes of every Cincinnati cop? The only thing you could do was run me out on some chickenshit thing. So fucking what? The brass still let me retire, take my pension.” He stabbed his chest with his hand. “I’m doin’ fine. Doin’ private work now, corporate security. Consulting. It’s easy money. I don’t have to deal with the niggers and the bullshit and the rat-fuck cops like you, Borders. I’m doin’ fine. Better than you.”
It occurred to Will that the meds must help tamp down anger. They must even dampen thoughts and reactions, even ones that had taken millions of years to be stamped into the species: “danger” and “flee.” It softened the fact that no other person was in the lobby or surrounding hallways. For the first time since his surgery he felt free of his body, projected instead into the charged space that separated him from Chambers. Will said, “You beat her, Marion, we know that.”
His face reddened on hearing his given name. “I could beat you! God, I wish you could stand and fight like a man.”
“She was afraid you would kill her.”
Chambers’ head dropped slightly as if a supporting cord in his neck had snapped. He looked at Will strangely. His tongue flicked out like a lizard’s.
“Where’d you hear that?” Will said nothing. Chambers stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. “She had a lot of ideas.” He stared past Will. “She was paranoid, fucking nuts. I put up with that for years. I wouldn’t hurt her.”
“You did hurt her. You beat her. The cops responded to a domestic at your house. They let you off. Then she got a restraining order against you.”
“That was just being married, give me a break. Now all these bitches are counselors and lawyers and they tell gals to ‘get a restraining order,’ and the husband’s always guilty. How many domestics did we respond to as uniforms that turned out to be nothing.”
“How many where the husband came back and killed the woman.”
Chambers leaned against the wall, pulled out a cigarette, and stuck it in his lips. He wanted to light up, but seeing a smoke detector overhead thought better of it. He stuck it back in the pack.
“We used to be friends, I thought,” he said. “You were a righteous cop on the streets, Borders, back in the day, when we worked District One together. We’d all get together. We were all family. I was nothing but happy for you when you aced the sergeant’s exam and then went to homicide. What’d I ever do to you?”
Will ignored him and wheeled six feet away and to the side, making Chambers turn to see him. Then he turned the chair toward him again and advanced. “I always wondered why you did it.”
“I didn’t.”
“Not why you killed Theresa, because we knew about your temper.” Chambers’ left eyelid flickered when Will said the woman’s name. “And motive. You had a girlfriend you wanted to be with. And Theresa had $500,000 in life insurance, still payable to you. I didn’t even wonder about the knife. The more I learned about you, Chambers, the more it made sense. No quick gunshot for Bud Chambers. That would take away the fun, the fear. I just wondered why you killed those other women.”
“I didn’t!” His voice was a mechanical hiss.
“I guess you got scared when we looked at the logical suspect, the estranged husband. Pretty dumb for a cop, if you ask me, because we always look at the husband first.”
“I was on duty…”
“That was your first lie to us.”
“Well, shit, so I was with Darlene. It wouldn’t be the first time a married cop saw his girlfriend on his dinner break. She told you I was there.”
“Yeah. I’m sure your little white-trash girlfriend was as afraid of you as your wife was. Or was she an accomplice? But we caught you in a lie about where you were the day your wife was murdered. I hate cops that lie. If they lie about one thing they’ll lie about the important things, too.”
“I was a good cop.” Chambers swallowed the words.
Will said, “I just never understood the others.”
“What?”
“The other women. Jill Kelly. Lisa Schultz.”
He moved up to Chambers, making him dance his toes away from the wheels, vaguely aware of his foolhardiness. “I mean, if you were going to tamper with the DNA and implicate Factor, why kill those other women? Why turn the beef with your wife into a serial killing that had the whole city terrified?”
“Factor raped her and killed her. He killed all those girls. It was his semen. A jury said so.”
“It was his semen with Theresa. That’s the only one he was convicted for. Craig Factor had a rap sheet as a Peeping Tom. He’d never even been arrested for a violent offense.”
“Who the hell knows what makes a psycho snap.”
“Yeah, you should know, Marion. Two other women all killed the same way. Their clothes neatly folded. Very violent knife attack. The knife wiped clean of prints and hidden in the same room. They had been raped, the same as Theresa. Only, the funny thing, there was no semen. You made them take showers before you killed them? And the mutilation. You especially liked that, right? Got your dick all hard, that sense of power.”
“You say. Nobody believed that.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Who else could have done it? By the time the second murder happened, we were all over Mount Adams with stakeouts. Everybody was locked in their houses after dark. But the killings went on. Who else could do that but a cop, somebody who knew how we worked and could monitor our radio frequencies. Somebody who could get a woman to open her door.”
“Get the fuck away from me.” Chambers sidestepped him and stood at a distance.
